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This has to be either some epic mis-targeting or something so brilliant I’ve fallen for it and haven’t noticed yet… I got paid $77 dollars via Sponsored Tweets to tweet about a car they’re promoting along with the new vampire movie.

I cannot fathom the math these people did – my account is short of a thousand followers – but I do have ten times more followers than what I’m following. .. Well, whatever – $77 pays for all those Amazon Mechanical Turk followers I had added some months back. I feel kinda bad for the $52.62 CPC for the advertiser. I’m still trying to figure out if this is for real- Time will tell.

Update: I’ve figured out how I did this… I was tired of getting $1 offers, so I went in and set my minimum offer price at $77… Someone evidently decided to take me up on my minimum price. I wonder what would happen if I set it to $777 now.

The Sponsored Tweets idea is starting to stink bad. If you don’t approve the tweets manually, which is a ridiculous time-sink, 80% of the tweeters (at least in my case) are bots – or people that only post ads. The single tweeter that landed 22 clicks simply tweeted “#ad” and the link – which brings in completely unqualified traffic – people who were just curious about the link, as opposed to curious or interested on the offer.

I would pay good money for a blacklist of bad tweeters, and a whitelist of legit ones.

The Sponsored Tweets system needs to get a Trust system in place ASAP so folks can start rating each other (think: eBay feedback – that’s a trust system)

I’m going to let this little experiment run its planned course – Who knows, I might be wrong.

What I did with Sponsored Tweets was link to a CPA offer, but not directly. I linked to an instance of WP-LinkEngine so I can control things better. I did not link to a single offer – What I did was use WP-Engine’s geo-targeting option to send US users to the main offer I was promoting and all others to a backup offer on the same product with a lower payout. I told sponsored Tweets I only wanted US traffic… That’s not what happened exactly.

WP-Linkengine reports 1738 clicks, out of which 177 are unique clicks.
Sponsored Tweets reports 44 clicks
The ad network reports 1588 clicks – roughly 1300 went to the US offer and 273 to the international offer… And ZERO sales.

When I look at the user-agents of the clicks on my site, they’re 80% not users. Here’s a snapshot of the user-agent strings of the last ten visitors to the offer link – note that the link can only be clicked on from the Sponsored Tweets redirect – it isn’t exposed to any other traffic. Out of these last ten visitors, only #3 and #9 look like a legitimate surfer – The others look like bots.

Speaking of clicks… I’m not sure yet if Sponsored Tweets is ripping everyone off with the cut they take on the CPC side. Tweeters get told that per click they will receive an amount that seems to be 1/3rd of what I agreed to pay Sponsored Tweets for them. That’s about a 66% spread!

I’m intrigued to see where this is going – if you think about it, it is in the tweeter’s best interest to tweet offers that are really relevant to their followers, so they get more clicks. With a little salt, pepper and luck these are people who also complete the offer.

On the Facebook side of the house:

The ads to promote the doomsday page are still “Pending Review”. Probably because I said I was willing to pay $0.02 per click – yes, I pulled that number out of my ass. I don’t understand how the heck FB is thinking I’m going to spend $1.04 to $1.51 for a click to a landing page on their own website – screw that! My targeting options would have to be either freaking psychic or my landing page would have to be visual heroin.

Meanwhile, the traffic from the Amazon Mechanical Turk has already landed more than 20 fans (fans, not just views) at a rate of about $0.04 each – You do the math. I know its not the kind of traffic I want, I can tell by the dearth of actual site page views… Its a journey, not a destination.

The Doomsday website is up and running and now has an awesome Facebook page, plus I launched a campaign on Facebook to drive traffic to it – since I don’t have much faith in FB – they have yet to approve the ads and they wanted a ridiculous amount per click, I went to a favorite little incentivized traffic source – the Amazon Mechanical Turk and plunked down a bit of cash for some fans – that site actually works – its worked wonders in the past and its working way better than stupid Facebork ads – Is it people that really like what I have to offer? It doesn’t matter, after 25 fans I can get a custom URL and I need to make a bit of noise. The other reason why it doesn’t matter is because its dirt cheap.

I am a little worried that according to their Webmaster Tools, Google only has 10 out of over a thousand webpages of that site indexed, even though a couple of days ago I gave them (and the site has) a proper XML sitemap. Hopefully, they’ll get with the program. I’m hoping I didn’t mess up the robots.txt or something really stupid.

An interesting thing I discovered while messing with FBML is that you can put a sidebar on the page’s “Wall” page by selecting the “Boxes” tab and choosing to move the FBML app to “The Wall” – Presto! You now have an FBML sidebar. The other thing I discovered is that Facebook now provides an FBML application – Its just a place to cut and paste your text, like the other ones, so we’re still in the doghouse.

The third thing I got going was a trial run of a sponsored tweets CPC campaign. Its late and I don’t really know what I’m doing… But heck I’m doing something! I have to say Sponsored Tweet’s dashboard is really neat – You can see the tweets, the clicks, the CPC, the person’s reach… I think that if I click the correct button I might actually find out what color underwear the tweeter is wearing. So far it all looks awesome… Just like this chick at the bottom of the post…

Thanks to Jonathan Volk I found out that Sponsored Tweets up-ended the Tweeting game. Now you can create PPC ads and toss them at the crowd of Twitter users – They take their pick and get paid per click.

This is a radical shift – The motivation and “action” button used to rest squarely on the advertisers, who would pay per ‘mention’ or tweet. The trouble with that model is that you have to pick who tweets your tweet. A tweet about a lingerie offer coming from me is probably worth $0.01, the same tweet coming from Lady Gaga is probably worth $400,000. With the “pay per mention” model advertisers had to set a price point and target the users they wanted to make an offer to at that price point.

On this new PPC model the advertisers sets up the payout per click and make the offer to the entire community. The community self-selects! Pure genius.

As a rather excitable guy… My goal for today is to do what I had planned PLUS get a PPC campaign going here. There are very few active campaigns – I want to get in now while people will SEE my campaign. You go ahead and wait a couple of weeks – the list of offers will be FLOODED and advertisers will have to game the sorting in addition to everything else.

Hold all my calls for the week – I’ve got some money burning a hole in my pocket!